Jewish Faith and Modern Science address fundamental questions facing many contemporary Jews, including the relevance of traditional beliefs for Jews who are increasingly secular and liberal, and how recent advances in science affect conventional Jewish philosophy. Samuelson assesses the current state of Jewish thought and suggests how it should change to remain relevant in the future.

The book is divided into three sections. The first provides a general historical overview for the Jewish thought that follows. The second summarizes the variety of basic kinds of popular, positive Jewish commitment in the twentieth century. The third and major section summarizes the basic thought of those modern Jewish philosophers whose thought is technically the best and/or the most influential in Jewish intellectual circles. The Jewish philosophers covered include Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Mordecai Kaplan, and (...) Emil Fackenheim. The text includes summaries and a selected bibliography of primary and secondary sources. (shrink)

The topic of this book is 'creation'. It breaks down into discussions of two distinct, but interrelated, questions: what does the universe look like, and what is its origin? The opinions about creation considered by Norbert Samuelson come from the Hebrew scriptures, Greek philosophy, Jewish philosophy, and contemporary physics. His perspective is Jewish, liberal, and philosophical. It is 'Jewish' because the foundation of the discussion is biblical texts interpreted in the light of traditional rabbinic texts. It is 'philosophical' because (...) the subject matter is important in both past and present philosophical texts, and to Jewish philosophy in particular. Finally, it is 'liberal' because the authorities consulted include heterodox as well as orthodox Jewish sources. The ensuing discussion leads to original conclusions about a diversity of topics, including the limits of human reason and religious faith, and the relevance of scientific models to religious doctrine. (shrink)

This book is intended as a text for courses in Jewish philosophy, as well as for more general courses in religious thought, in Judaism, and in philosophy. The book presupposes no prior background in Judaism, in philosophy, or in Jewish philosophy. Each chapter concludes with sets of key terms and questions as well as recommendations for further reading.

This book brings together for the first time a collection of essays by some of the most distinguished contemporary Jewish philosophers on issues such as the nature of Jewish philosophy from the perspectives of general philosophy, classical Jewish philosophy and Jewish law, the role of reason and revelation as authority in Judaism, and the impact of contemporary philosophy of history and language on Judaism. The book is a living record of the revitalization of Jewish philosophy in the post-Holocaust world. Co-published (...) with Studies in Judaism. (shrink)

Revelation and the God of Israel explores the concept of revelation as it emerges from the Hebrew Scriptures and is interpreted in Jewish philosophy and theology. The first part is a study in intellectual history that attempts to answer the question, what is the best possible understanding of revelation. The second part is a study in constructive theology and attempts to answer the question, is it reasonable to affirm belief in revelation. Here Norbert M. Samuelson focuses on the challenges (...) given from a variety of contemporary academic disciplines, including evolutionary psychology, political ethics, analytic philosophy of religion, and source critical studies of the Bible. This important book offers a unique approach to theological questions and fresh solutions to them and will appeal to those interested in the history of philosophy, religious thought, and Judaism. (shrink)

This user-friendly guide will help students of the 'Star' to be able to discuss at a basic level what, at least conceptually, Rosenzweig intended to say and how all that he says is interrelated.

A suggestion for research on Rosenzweig and Viktor von Weizsacker, Franz Rosenzweig's Philosophical legacy: Levinas or Strauss?

In 1925-26, the late Max Born gave two sets of lectures at M.I.T., one on the structure of the atom, the other on the lattice theory of rigid bodies. Problems of Atomic Dynamics contains the text of both sets.What gives this volume its remarkable interest is just those dates: 1925-26. This must have been, by all accounts, the headiest period in twentieth-century physics, and Max Born was one of the leaders of the ferment. As Norbert Wiener remembers, "When Professor (...) Born came to the United States [for these lectures in 1925] he was enormously excited about the new basis Heisenberg had just given for the quantum theory of the atom."These lectures represent perhaps the most vivid written record of the transition between the "old" quantum theory of Bohr, and the "new" theory. "At the time I began this course of lectures," Born writes, "Heisenberg's first paper on the new quantum theory had just appeared. Here his masterly treatment gave the quantum theory an entirely new turn. The paper of Jordan and myself, in which we recognized the matrix calculus as the proper formulation of Heisenberg's ideas, was in press, and the manuscript of a third paper by the three of us was almost completed."Even as the lecture series progressed, Born became familiar with new results, which he introduced into his presentation: Pauli's fourth quantum number, Dirac's formalism, his own work on a general operational calculus. And yet, in spite of the conditions of revolutionary changes in physics that year -- in which established ancien regime principles were collapsing almost monthly -- the theory is developed with a cool elegance and with a formal completeness which may be regarded as a "limiting case" of its current state. These lectures represent the foundations of quantum theory, and they have withstood the tests of time -- the tests of more than forty years of experimental evidence. (shrink)

Max Weber’s thesis on the decisive influence of Protestant ethic on the formation and development of modern capitalism has become one of the best-known and widely shared canonical claims in social sciences. Since its publication at the beginning of the 20th century, this thesis, supported by subsequent great works by the German classic, has rarely been the subject of major controversy. The work of correcting Weber’s thesis was undertaken in the late 20th century by Michael Novak. Novak’s correction (...) is not confrontational, but complementary. The American thinker abandons the research area of minority Protestant communities, which caught Weber’s attention, and undertakes an analysis of the broader religious tradition, developing both before and after the Reformation. In particular, the achievements of Pope John Paul II, interpreted by Novak in terms of the renewal of a liberty current of Catholic social thought, provide important corrective data. (shrink)

In this article Weber’s famous theory concerning “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” is taken as a theory of civilization. It is shown that in his analysis of ascetic Puritanism, and also of the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination, Weber comes to depict the principle of self-control as the main feature of the Puritan which makes him “the father of modern self-discipline”. Self-discipline in turn is the principal ability of modern man in Norbert Elias’ theory of civilization. But (...) all these categories that Elias uses to describe the status of being civilized – self-control, control of emotion, methodical moderation of spontaneity, punctuality etc. – already appear in the work of Max Weber in his attempt to explain the religious genesis of such attitudes. (shrink)

This paper explores the Australian community’s reaction to the deportation of unvaccinated tennis star, Novak Djokovic, in the lead up to the 2022 Australian Open. The analysis interprets the community’s hostile reaction to Djokovic by understanding community as both a structural and dynamic concept and, even more so, how fluid, evolving macro influences of community or group identification can intensify the demands of individuals to compromise for the common good based on ingrained expectations of the community. To do this, (...) Norbert Elias’ concepts of figurations and ‘we-they’ group identities are used to help highlight the link between structural and dynamic theories of community and identity. This study also outlines how ‘what is fair’ lies in pre-existing community rules and conventions being influenced by often momentary factors that impact and often change forms of group identity. These changes can be temporary or long-lasting and are driven by macro influences such as COVID-19 that can intensify existing community tensions. Throughout the analysis, it becomes clear that community’s response to Djokovic was not only fair, but a logical manifestation of community. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION: Capgras delusion is sometimes defined as believing that close relatives have been replaced by strangers. But such replacement beliefs also occur in response to encountering an acquaintance, or the voice of a familiar person, or a pet, or some personal possession. All five scenarios involve believing something familiar has been replaced by something unfamiliar. METHODS: We evaluate the proposal that these five kinds of delusional belief should count as subtypes of the same delusion. RESULTS: Personally familiar stimuli activate the (...) sympathetic nervous system (SNS) much more strongly than unfamiliar stimuli. In Capgras delusion, this difference is absent, prompting the delusional idea that a familiar person is actually a stranger. We suggest this absence of an effect of familiarity on SNS response will occur in all five scenarios and will prompt the idea that the familiar has been replaced by the unfamiliar. CONCLUSIONS: We propose that: (a) all five scenarios be referred to as subtypes of Capgras delusion; (b) in all five, ideas about replacement are prompted by weakness of SNS responses to familiar stimuli; (c) this is insufficient to generate delusion. For a delusional idea to become a belief, a second factor (impaired hypothesis evaluation) must also be present. (shrink)

Poppers Logik der Forschung steht für eine erhebliche Problemverschiebung in der Wissenschaftstheorie, von der Logik der Forschung zur Verfassung der Wissenschaft. Popper sieht die Methodologie als eine Institution, als ein Regelsystem für die Akzeptanz oder Verwerfung von Theorien und Beobachtungsaussagen. Dieser immer noch wenig beachtete institutionelle Aspekt von Poppers kritischem Rationalismus ist zum einen für die Interpretation der methodologischen Regeln von Bedeutung. Zum anderen wirft er ein neues Problem auf: Kann sich eine solche Methodologie als Verfassung der Wissenschaft etablieren? Eine (...) institutionenökonomische Analyse des wissenschaftlichen Wettbewerbs zeigt, dass eine notwendige Bedingung dafür erfüllt ist: die Methodologie des kritischen Rationalismus ist anreizkompatibel, das heißt, es liegt im Interesse eines Forschers, diese Methodologie zu beachten, wenn er erwartet, dass die anderen Forscher ebenso verfahren. (shrink)

Now remembered primarily as Franz Kafta's friend and literary executor, Max Brod was an accomplishered thinker and writer in his own right. In this volume, he considers the nature and differences between Judaism and Christianity, addressing some of the most perplexing questions at the heart of human existence. “One of the most famous and widely discussed books of the 1920’s, Max Brod’s Paganism—Christianity—Judaism, has at last found its way into English translation to confront a new generation of readers. Max Brod (...) is best remembered today as the literary editor and friend of Franz Kafka. In his day, however, he was the more famous of the two by far. A major novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and composer, he was also, as this book demonstrates, a serious thinker on the perennial questions that are at the heart of human existence. . . .Some of his judgments are open to question. Still, with all its limitations, this is a forthright and passionate proclamation of the uniqueness of Judaism. Paganism—Christianity—Judaism was an intellectual and spiritual event when it was first published and it remains a valuable document even now.” —Rabbi Jack Riemer, Hadassah. (shrink)

This paper summarised the main arguments presented in "Consciousness, brain and the physical world" Philosophical Psychology (1990) to introduce a symposium on that paper. This was the first symposium on Velmans' Reflexive Model of Perception (the departure point for Reflexive Monism). This summary of the 1990 paper was followed by three critiques (by Robert Rentoul, Norman Wetherick, and Grant Gillett) followed by two replies. At the time of this upload (25 years later) many of the points in the 1991 paper (...) have become common currency, however some of the confusions about the implications of the reflexive model persist, so the discussion continues to have contemporary relevance. See academia.edu link for the entire symposium. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:DESIRE, TECHNOLOGY, AND POLITICS Pieter Tijmes University ofTwente This essay examines the relationship between desire, technology, and politics in three stages. First, I discuss modernity as a deviation from the general human way of life. By that I mean the general life pattern of human beings since "the foundation of the world," since the emergence of human culture. The expression designates the traditional pattern of subsistence economy. This general (...) pattern is contrasted with modern life as of the sixteenth-century in the West, from which time capitalism governs habits of accumulation and spending that we take to be "natural." But it is in fact exceptional when seen from a larger historical perspective. In the wake of René Girard and in particular Paul Dumouchel, modernity is to be interpreted as the realm of scarcity which is the result of a new way of dealing with mimetic desire. Second, this theory of scarcity is connected with Albert Borgmann's device paradigm of technology which is shown to fit the paradigm of scarcity perfectly. According to Borgmann technology is a matter of devices that procure commodities. In modern ideology technology turns out to be the ally against scarcity. Third, this pattern of the device paradigm is recognized in all our societal and political processes. In this context political problems are solved along the lines of the device paradigm. The consequence is that political ideas and ideals have been eroded. I. Traditional and Modern Society The human way of life that has emerged in the West since the Middle Ages is a new phenomenon in history. One could even argue that modernity as the new life pattern is a deviation from the general human way of life. Nearly everybody agrees on the difference, but there is no unanimity about the nature of the difference between traditional and specific modern 86Pieter Tijimes patterns. A host of interpreters, Karl Marx, Georg Tönnies, Max Weber, Norbert Elias—to mention only a few Germans—have commented on the transition from what I am calling the general way of life to modernity as a kind of deviation. In the wake of René Girard and Paul Dumouchel I would characterize modernity as a different way of dealing with the problem of mimetic desire as the basic form of human behavior. By mimetic desire I mean that people do not cherish authentic desires, but take their desires from others. They imitate others in their desiring. It is the other who tells them what is desirable. This theory of mimetic desire is at bottom a theory of conflict, because conflicts arise from the situation where one desires what another also desires, with the result that the two desires clash with each other over the same object. The norm in traditional cultures is to restrict mimetic desire by various taboos, rites, etc. It is specifically modern to set it loose, with consequences I shall examine herein. Let me formulate this theory in another way: we are not born with fixed ideas, wishes, desires, but we learn them from the social and cultural environment we were dependent upon. Our parents were the first significant others. We learned to look at the world through their eyes. To us reality looked as they saw it. They provided us with their frame of reference to interpret it. This social and cultural learning process is of eminent importance for how and what we think, want or feel. What we found after our birth became our point of departure and was considered as "normal." In this sense, children are the most adapted beings. They will only speak the language they hear, although they have an innate ability for every possible language. Thus we desire in terms of the desires we meet in our environment. We do not start life with a fixed identity, but identity is the result of a learning process that goes on through our whole life. On the one hand, mimesis opens up our possibility of relationships with our fellow men and the world, and on the other hand, mimesis can also be an invasion route for all sorts of entanglements, conflicts and rivalries. How to deal with mimetic desire is a cultural problem. In... (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity is one of the bestknown, but also most controversial works of Critical Theory. Many philosophers, writers and editorialists have attacked the text in recent decades and accused Adorno of cultivating his own “jargon”. In his book, Adorno develops a critique of metaphysical and theological language, which he observed in Germany from the 1920s up to the 1960s. In my paper, I argue that the mode of critique Adorno deploys is still relevant today, even if (...) its object has largely disappeared. This becomes clear in comparison to the language criticism of the analytical tradition, namely logical empiricism or Harry G. Frankfurt’s critique of “bullshit,” which are comparably more widespread today in academic debates. While Adorno examines linguistic expressions in terms of their social content and places them in a historical constellation, the critique of “bullshit” following Frankfurt remains constrained to a personal approach. In the language criticism of logical empiricism, on the other hand, the possibility of understanding linguistic phenomena as expressions of social conditions is still present. From this comparison, much can be learned for an up-to-date language criticism. (shrink)

This article introduces the special section on the contribution of Jack Goody, which focuses on The Theft of History (2006). Goody attacks the notion of a radical division between Europe and Asia, which has become built into the commonsense academic wisdom and categorical apparatus of the social sciences and humanities. Eurocentrism is a constant target as he scrutinizes and finds wanting the claims of the West to have invented modern science, cultural renaissances, the free city, capitalism, democracy, love and secularism. (...) Goody’s approach favours a dynamic long-term basis for comparisons between societies and focuses on the exchange of information and goods across Eurasia to argue that the comparative advantage one society gains has been only temporary, swinging between different parts of Eurasia a number of times over the millennia. Goody suggests that China developed an active mercantile urban culture before Europe. Cities and towns with their mixture of luxury and learning, should not be seen as inevitably subordinate to centralized power structures in both eastern and western Eurasia. Goody criticizes the theoretical assumptions and the handling of evidence of Perry Anderson, Fernand Braudel, Norbert Elias, Moses Finlay, David Landes, Karl Marx, Joseph Needham, Immanuel Wallerstein and Max Weber. His concern is that the master categories of world history, such as antiquity, feudalism and capitalism, have been developed against a background of the particular European trajectory, then projected onto the world at large. Goody remains sceptical, not just about eurocentrism, but also the additional danger of being eurocentric about ethnocentricity, which he regards as a trap that postcolonialism and postmodernism frequently fall into. (shrink)

Vodola, Max On a wet Melbourne evening on Saturday 16 September 1916, Archbishop Daniel Mannix, coadjutor to Dr Thomas Carr, attended the opening of the parish bazaar at St John's Parish, Clifton Hill. Mannix was on his way to another function when he made the unscheduled stop at Albert Hall on Queen's Parade.2 After opening the bazaar, Mannix spoke for a few minutes about an issue of great significance, the proposal by the Hughes Government for compulsory military service. Mannix spoke (...) about achieving an honourable peace without conscription, describing conscription as 'a hateful thing' and opining that 'the present war would not have achieved such disastrous proportions if conscription had not prevailed in Europe'. Mannix insisted that Australia had done her fair share and that conscription in Australia would cause more evil than it would avert.3 In speaking on conscription, Daniel had entered the lion's den. Mannix later reflected that the speech at Clifton Hill was his 'original sin'. (shrink)

Developing a reading of some of Beauvoir and Sartre's most influential writings in philosophy, Max Deutscher explores contemporary philosophy in the light of the phenomenological tradition within which Being and Nothingness and The Second Sex occurred as striking events operating on the border of the modern and the 'post-modern'. Deutscher traces the shifts of genre that produce their gendered philosophies, and responds in terms of contemporary experience to the mood and the arguments of their works. Drawing upon the writings of (...) two contemporary critics in particular - Michele Le Dœuff and Luce Irigaray - Deutscher reworks this part of philosophy's history in order to advance thinking in contemporary philosophy, generate renewed philosophical reflection on consciousness, freedom and one's relation to others, and to return a look still cast in our direction from an earlier time. (shrink)

This book reconstructs and brings together the work of a number of social and political theorists in order to gain new insight on the emergence and character of modern Western society. It examines the intersection point of social theory and historical sociology in a new theoretical approach called "reflexive historical sociology". There is analysis of the works of Max Weber, Michel Foucault, Norbert Elias, Eric Voegelin and a number of others. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 (...) examines the works of Eric Voegelin, Norbert Elias, Lewis Mumford and Franz Borkenau. Part 2 is concerned with the major conceptual tools such as experience, liminality, process, symbolisation, figuration, order, dramatisation and reflexivity, and themes such as the history of forms of thought, subjectivity, knowledge and closed space and regulated time. Finally, the book examines the most important insights of the thinkers discussed, concerning the historical processes that led to modernity. (shrink)

According to Nagel, bat consciousness is "what it is like to be a bat.'' According to Baars, we will never know what it is like to be bat, so this approach to consciousness does not allow the science of consciousness to progress. Rather, the nature of consciousness as such should be determined empirically, by contrasting processes which are conscious with processes that are not conscious. The present commentary argues that contrastive analysis is appropriate for finding the processes most closely associated (...) with consciousness; but it will not illuminate the nature of consciousness as such. Unlike bat consciousness, human consciousness is accessible to humans introspectively. Consequently, a complete science of consciousness needs to relate introspective, first-person accounts of consciousness to third-person processing models of the brain. (shrink)

Responding to the rash of books supporting a "new atheism" in recent years, some excellent rebuttals and refutations by Berlinski, Novak, Hart, Day, and others have also been published. The present book, however, is not a continuation of these critical salvos against the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, and Harris, but engages in a fresh reexamination of several important aspects of the "God-question," along with an exploration of the theory of the "faith-instinct"---a theory that emerges from a respectably long (...) tradition, but in recent years has been largely relegated to the sidelines in theology and philosophy. In the first chapter, scientific, metaphysical, and theological approaches are utilized and integrated in relationship to the question of God's existence. The second chapter is devoted to the "problem of evil," differentiated into the special categories often lumped into that all-too-generic term---moral evils, natural evils, suffering as an evil. Chapter 3 concerns the obvious follow-up question concerning what sort of characteristics, personal or otherwise, we can attribute to God---going beyond the question of God's mere "existence," even if and when we are intellectually convinced of this existence. In the second half of the book, the various meanings of "faith" are considered; and the apparent discrepancy of many New Testament descriptions of faith with the conventional Catholic and Protestant concepts of faith is investigated. Some "family resemblances" of supernatural faith seem to emerge. Then a monograph by Tubingen theologian Max Seckler, Instinkt und Glaubenswille ("Instinct and the Will to Believe"), which comments on thought-provoking texts concerning a "faith-instinct" in the works of Thomas Aquinas, is considered; Seckler brings out the philosophical and theological basis for this concept, as well as its reverberations for modern theology. The theory of a faith-instinct, however, leads to the question of the proper and improper, real or substitute, "objects," of the proposed instinct. Finally, if this instinct is, as hypothesized, implanted in human nature itself, for all places and all times, what is the function of the various religions in "activating" or placing obstacles to, the activation of this instinct? How are "false prophets," who may be instrumental in redirecting or misdirecting this instinct, to be recognized? Is faith bolstered or hindered by miracles---do miracles have any important relationship to faith? The book ends with a final consideration of the probable mental outlook of the atheist confronted with claims by theists of varying persuasions. (shrink)

”Die ehemalige Nietzsche-Gesellschaft, von der sich der heutige Nietzsche-Kreis herleitet, zu ihrer Zeit eine angesehene wissenschaftliche Vereinigung, wurde, wenn man den alten Mitgliedern glaubt, immer noch einmal gegründet. Ihr Schicksal spiegelt paradigmatisch die Irritationen der Nietzsche-Rezeption bei den Deutschen seit Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges.“ Die ”Chronik des Nietzsche-Kreises“, 1994 bereits einmal erschienen, liegt nun in aktualisierter Form vor, erweitert um den Blick auf die Jahre 1994-2006 und die aktualisierte Chronik der Vorträge der Nietzsche-Gesellschaft bzw. des Nietzsche-Kreises und des Nietzsche-Forums München (...) e. V. (shrink)

Wat maakt iemand tot een goede politicus? Welke eigenschappen moet hij hebben en welke juist niet? In Webers ogen moet hij in ieder geval reiken naar het onmogelijke. Feitelijk moet hij een held zijn.